MSBuild VS Cake

I did get confirmation that the actual kill has been postponed to .Net 9.0 rather than .Net 8.0 . However, that PR is factually wrong regarding when System.Runtime.Serialization use became opt-in -- I had to counter-adjust Rogue Survivor Revived to opt into using System.Runtime.Serialization for .Net 7.0, last November i.e. Nov 2022.

Like this https://github.com/dotnet/msbuild/blob/d0060335c1fb2f0523b1cf4656c464c5c4316783/src/Framework/NativeMethods.cs

Here is a taste of what to expect: https://github.com/dotnet/msbuild

The main thing they do is to list projects so that you can open a solution and see a set of projects, or build a solution and build everything there. They also give a lot of customization and fortunately it's rare that you need to know anything about that. It does feel somewhat unnecessary since you should be able to open a project with its dependencies. Hopefully solution files are going to be cleaned up: https://github.com/dotnet/msbuild/issues/1730

Since the previous check, the project has grown a lot. Our analyzer has become more advanced, too. This only makes this task more interesting! Despite the high quality of the MSBuild product and the well-known name of its creator, we again managed to find some issues in MSBuild's source code. The project is almost entirely written in C#. You can see it on GitHub. We took the code from this commit.

relevant github issue: https://github.com/dotnet/msbuild/issues/1730

msbuild is the "make" system, but for .Net. Those .csproj files are just makefiles by another name. Also, msbuild is not Windows-only. The readme specifically states that it can run on Unix (and Unix-like) systems that support .Net Core.

You can't do without source files when you want to better understand what is happening "under the hood" of a particular system. For example, do you want to improve your understanding of how types from the standard library work? The source code of .NET Framework and .NET will help you to do that. Do you want to dig deeper into the compiler? No problem - here is the Roslyn's source code at your service. Do you need to look inside the build system? Here you go - the MSBuild code is also open-source. By the way, if you are interested in build processes, you may also find MSBuild Structured Log Viewer useful. It's a tool that allows you to work with MSBuild build logs in a convenient format.

This is why 90-99% of our builds are done with Cake. It isolates all of it and you can run the build locally if you want.

A good starting point of you want to get started with Cake is our website at https://cakebuild.net/

I don't think it will get too much confusion, but there is a build system called Cake: https://cakebuild.net/

You may use other tools too: psake, make, cake, fake or any other *ake you are familiar with. I look at them as a tools that make build tasks behind simple commands and help me answer: How did I run that code again?

NAnt was quite a popular build tool used by projects of all sizes targeting .NET Framework on Windows. I have written many complex build systems using NAnt in the past. But XML based DSL was quite clunky to use and maintain. Besides, it was always a daunting task to explain to a new dev on the team. With .NET Core/.NET becoming a cross-platform framework, CAKE and FAKE gained a lot of adoption providing a C# and F# based DSL for build tasks accordingly.

Cake (C# Make) - simple, easy to set up, and with a lot of extensions scripting with C#.

I got the example and the answer I needed on this thread: https://github.com/cake-build/cake/discussions/3564

For those not familiar with it, Cake is a build automation system with a C#-based DSL. It is based on the concept of tasks, which are small units of work, like restoring packages, building, or testing, which can have dependencies on, or trigger, other tasks.

Just a note: there's already a very active community of the same name for the build utility Cake.

Looks interesting! Although the name clashes with Cake (C# Make) project which could be confusing - https://cakebuild.net/